BIREME’s new institutional webpage in the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) system was inaugurated in October 2020, at the same web address, with interfaces in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
The migration from the Joomla platform to Drupal was determined by the PAHO/WHO ITS Department for a number of technical and economic reasons, as maintaining servers to house the Headquarters, Representations, and Centers web pages had become very costly. Among them, the following stand out: ensuring continuity of operation 24/7; providing a more secure environment, due to the more robust and flexible software; satisfying the organization’s next generation web publishing needs, increasing the capacity of the Organization’s Communications area (CMU) to focus on innovation, learning, brand and reputation management, quality control, visitor involvement, and the ability to update the web content more efficiently. In addition, the Drupal online content management system allows optimization of the search engine; introducing design features to produce more visually appealing content and improve user experience and accessibility.
The visitor to the new institutional website is welcomed by an image of the BIREME Historical Mural, a panel that is located at the entrance of the Center’s facilities and summarizes BIREME’s history since its foundation in 1967, including the past and current directors of the Center and of PAHO/WHO, as well as supporting institutions of BIREME at national, regional, and international levels.
The new page contains all the information from the previous version, such as the mission, objectives, history, governance (data on the Advisory and Scientific Committees and all sessions held), as well as new content, made possible by the current, more flexible information architecture, which allows for the inclusion of new sections and content.
The “COVID-19 Resources” section deserves to be highlighted, showing the Window of Knowledge on the subject and the PAHO and WHO databases. Next, the Center’s three main products, the Virtual Health Library (VHL), Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS) and the Health Sciences Descriptors (DeCS), followed by 14 other products and services for scientific and technical information from BIREME, with their respective access links. The Educational Resources – online self-learning courses – created by the professionals of the Center are listed below.
An important section refers to the institutional supporters of the Center at national, regional, and international levels, with whom BIREME develops terms of cooperation, projects, and information products, which are vital for its sustainability. In addition, historical supporters are included, with whom BIREME maintained cooperative relations at some point in its trajectory.
The BIREME Bulletin is present on the new institutional page through a link to its homepage and an RSS service updates the latest tweets published on the Center’s institutional Twitter page.
Next is the news section. Only the stories from 2020 were migrated through a script developed by the CMU professionals. The previous content will be stored on offline Joomla pages, though it is not known for how long. The news is periodically updated and published in three languages, constituting an important source of verification of results in projects and terms of cooperation with counterparties.
A last section called Mandates and Strategies stores documents of sessions of the Pan American Board of Directors and Sanitary Conferences that concern the Governance of BIREME and its Statute.
Sections such as Events, for Seminars, Congresses or celebrations can also be added, as exemplified recently with the celebration of LILACS’s 35 years.
In short, the new institutional page reflects BIREME’s identity in most of its aspects and fulfills its objective of being the Center’s public interface in the PAHO/WHO system on the Internet.